Nerdvana – live from CeBIT | 4BC
CEBIT, Sydney’s annual tech and innovation show attracting 20,000 plus visitors to 3 days and 450 exhibitions, was up and running this week and it was a perfect location for a live segment on 4BC, looking at all things innovation and future.
Our chat took us across the realms of rummaging through the exhibition’s treasure trove of what’s ahead, looking at drones and robots, at home automation and 3D printers and some wonderful new start-up ideas and then on to two live interviews with CeBIT exhibitors and stars.
Our first conversation was with Brendan Ryan of Entitlemate a NSW StartUp that will help families understand the real cost of childcare by cutting through the complexity of childcare entitlements by allowing them to enter their details and then using its secret sauce algorithms to work out which government pension or subsidy they may be entitled to.
Our second chat was with Tas Tudor of Strone, an exhibitor I came across in my walk through of the show and thought his new invention was just what the world needed, freedom to stay connected on your own cell phone number, wherever in the world you are, on any device you choose. It’s a unique patented gadget (that’s just received multimillion dollar angel investment) that lets you put your phones sim card into it, leave it and the device at home and it will then transfer your incoming calls for free to wherever you are.
A really great couple of chats and a great way to do a segment, so have a listen now (17 minutes 54 seconds)
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does a major technology trade show like CeBIT actually reveal about enterprise technology direction?
Major technology trade shows like CeBIT reveal different signals than the consumer-oriented shows like CES: the enterprise technology on display at CeBIT is closer to deployment-ready and closer to real commercial application than the concept-stage innovations at consumer events; the purchasing signals from the enterprise buyers attending tell you which categories of technology are moving from experimentation to investment decisions; and the geographic and industry mix of attendees and exhibitors reflects genuine demand patterns across sectors and regions. The limitation is that trade shows tend to over-represent the vendor perspective and under-represent the implementation challenges — the demonstration environment is always more favourable than the enterprise reality. The most valuable signal from a trade show is not what the technology can do in ideal conditions but which categories are attracting serious enterprise investment attention.
Q: What was the 2015 CeBIT signal landscape revealing about enterprise technology priorities?
The 2015 CeBIT landscape was revealing several significant enterprise technology priorities: cloud computing had moved from scepticism to active adoption in large enterprises, with the question shifting from ‘whether to cloud’ to ‘which workloads and which providers’; the Internet of Things was generating significant enterprise interest particularly in manufacturing, logistics, and facilities management, with connected sensor deployment accelerating; cybersecurity was becoming a board-level concern rather than a purely technical issue, driven by a series of high-profile breaches; and the data analytics and business intelligence category was expanding as enterprises began to understand the value of the data they were generating. The pattern in retrospect was the beginning of the digital transformation wave that would preoccupy enterprise technology investment for the following decade.
Q: What is the gap between what enterprise technology can do and what organisations are actually doing with it?
The implementation gap — the difference between technological capability and organisational deployment — is consistently wider than technology vendors acknowledge and wider than most organisations recognise about themselves: most organisations are operating enterprise software capabilities at a fraction of their designed functionality; the data quality and governance required to extract value from analytics investments is systematically underdeveloped; the organisational change management required to realise technology investment benefits is chronically underinvested relative to the technology itself; and the cultural conditions (risk tolerance, experimentation permission, failure acceptance) that enable organisations to learn from technology implementation are often incompatible with the control and accountability structures of large organisations. The implication is that most organisations have more untapped value in their existing technology investments than they would gain from new technology purchases — but new technology purchases are more visible and more attributable than the hard organisational work of realising existing investment value.
Q: How can I book Morris Misel for an enterprise technology, digital transformation, or innovation keynote?
Contact the team at morrismisel.com/event-organisers.
CEBIT, Sydney’s annual tech and innovation show attracting 20,000 plus visitors to 3 days and 450 exhibitions, was up and running this week and it was a perfect location for a live segment on 4BC, looking at all things innovation and future. Our chat took us across the realms of .
When signals like Nerdvana live from CeBIT emerge, organisations that engage early have the advantage of choosing their response rather than reacting to events. That gap between those who prepared and those who did not is where competitive positioning is actually made or lost.
The most important question is not whether Nerdvana live from CeBIT will matter, but how quickly it will matter in your specific context. Leaders benefit most from mapping the ripple effects early — not just the direct impact but the second and third-order consequences that arrive later and hit harder. That is the practical work of foresight.
